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Posts published by Lynn Vavreck

The caricatures flourish. People who can’t agree on anything political find common ground on one point: undecided voters are vapid, disengaged and a little bit frightening.

And yet there they are, still part of the electorate. Over the past few weeks, I have been using data from the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project to explore the thoughts and feelings of voters who were undecided last December. The takeaway has been that they are typically less interested in politics; they pay less attention to news in general; and they are more likely to have moderate ideas on contemporary political questions (but 30 percent report that they have no political ideas at all). So far, the caricature pretty much holds.

They are also more likely to be women (63 percent), more likely to have less than a high school education; less likely to hold a graduate degree; and more likely to have family incomes of less than $30,000 a year.

The data, however, also reveal that almost half of the undecided consider themselves Democrats or Republicans. But even this cue is not as strong for them – only 65 percent eventually choose their party’s candidate (as opposed to 95 percent of early-deciding partisans).

It is possible that political signals like party mean less to late-deciders because politics is like a foreign country to them. But another possibility is that some of their ideas conflict with the positions their putative party takes.

Here’s an example. On the question of whether to raise taxes on families earning more than $200,000 a year, most Democrats say yes – roughly 80 percent of early-deciding and undecided voters favor this policy. But among Republicans, 60 percent of early deciders oppose this policy while only a quarter of undecided voters oppose it. Even at the highest levels of income (more than $100,000 a year), the difference among Republican early and late deciders on this issue is more than 30 points.

Similar differences can be found on whether undocumented immigrants who have been living in the United States should have a legal path to citizenship. Compared to early-deciding Democrats, undecided Democrats are more than 30 points less likely to favor the pathway; undecided Republicans are 20 points less likely to oppose it compared to their co-partisans.

But these out-of-step late-deciding semi-partisans do not always abandon their party at the ballot box. Conflicted, undecided Democrats are more likely (75 percent to 25) to break for Romney over Obama if they oppose raising taxes on the rich, but no more likely to break for Romney if they oppose the pathway to citizenship. The reverse is true for conflicted, undecided Republicans – more likely to choose Obama if they disagree with Republicans on immigration, but no more likely to choose Obama if they disagree with Romney on taxing the rich.

Looked at in this light, the undecided actually exemplify a type of political flexibility we often claim to admire, but often denigrate in practice. A healthy portion of undecided voters seem to understand when they are out of step with their party and this sometimes drives them to the opposing candidate. They may not be as interested in news or politics as you are, but they consider their preferences relative to party positions when making up their minds. Adjust those caricatures.

Let’s briefly move away from party to another canonical driver of voter choice in American elections: attitudes about race. Despite the subject’s prevalence in 2008, when the economic collapse portended a strong Democratic victory, the discussion of race has been conspicuously absent in 2012 or at least much less of a focus. The problem with this is that the 2012 election is going to be much closer. Attitudes about race could be pivotal in a way they almost surely could not have been in 2008, when we couldn’t stop talking about it.

I’ve modeled votes for Obama or Romney separately for early deciders and initially undecided voters using only party identification, ideology, retrospective evaluations of the nation’s economy, and a measure called racial resentment.

Racial resentment is one of a set of regularly used political science measures of attitudes about race. It is born from the concept of symbolic racism, which has its share of critics. Essentially, it is a scale of four survey questions asking people to agree or disagree with questions about whether “generations of slavery” have made it hard for blacks to work their way up the economic ladder – or whether blacks would be as well off as whites if they only “tried harder.”

Here is what the relationship looks like in 2012 plotting across deciles of resentment in the overall sample. After controlling for party, ideology and economic judgments, increasing levels of racial resentment (moving from left to right on the horizontal axis) decrease the likelihood of voting for Obama – not a shock. But here’s where it gets interesting. For voters who were able to make up their minds early, moving from the lowest levels of resentment to the highest drops the chance of their voting for Obama by more than 70 points. The comparable drop among initially undecided voters is only slightly more than 10 points.

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As we saw with party, attitudes about race among the undecided are related to their choices, but the relationship is weaker than it is for those who decide early. In other words, the racial attitudes of undecided voters do not affect their vote for or against Obama as dramatically as those same attitudes affect otherwise-similar early deciders.

On the one hand, this could be interpreted as more good news — another blow at the caricature. Perhaps undecided voters are truly post-racial. If race mattered to them as much as it does early deciders, they’d have already made up their minds, as the more partisan do. Maybe these voters are the ones who have moved “beyond” race, at least in terms of their candidate selection.

On the other hand, I’m already catching sight of Seth Meyers over at “Saturday Night Live “ working on the next skit about undecided voters with the too-good-to-pass-up punch line: “Wait, what do you mean the president’s black?”

Lynn Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies at U.C.L.A. She is a co-author, with John Sides, of “The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election,” the author of “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns,” and co-principal investigator of the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project.

It’s been a big couple of weeks for our presidential candidates. Jihadi murders, protests, diplomatic crises, a secret video, accusations of Islamist sympathy — and all of this with just over six weeks left until Election Day.

Will these events affect the outcome of the election? Who among us is still undecided? Are people changing their minds about the candidates? And will the events of the last two weeks (and the remaining six) influence people at all?

If you believe the conventional wisdom about elections, the pivotal moments in presidential campaigns come in the last 50 days or so. The only problem with this claim is that by the time Ronald Reagan chortled and said, “There you go again” to Jimmy Carter, or Michael Dukakis hopped in that tank and ground the gears, nearly all of the people who would turn out to vote in November had long since made up their minds. So how pivotal can these moments be?

In a December 2011 YouGov poll for the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project, 94 percent of those polled had already made up their minds about whom to support in a Mitt Romney-Barack Obama contest. Got that? Before the Republican primaries even began, before Romney was even the nominee, only 6 percent of voters were undecided.

YouGov interviewed nearly 44,000 people in December, after which my collaborator, John Sides, and I interviewed 1,000 people from the original set every week beginning Jan. 1. (We’ll keep it up through Election Day.) Thirty-seven weeks into the year, and with only 47 days left until Nov. 6, how many of those initially undecided voters are still up in the air? How do the previously undecided voters choose sides? And do people ever change their minds during the campaign once they’ve made a choice?

Let’s start with the easy part – on average, half of the 1,543 initially undecided voters report that they are still unsure in 2012. But the closer we get to the election, the fewer people remain undecided. The latest two surveys (one after each convention) show that the share of still uncommitted voters (from that initial group) had dwindled to 25 percent.

Where are these voters going as they make up their minds? On average, over the course of 2012, 28 percent of December’s undecided voters moved to Romney, and 26 percent to Obama.

Lynn Vavreck

In the figure, it is easy to see the increasing rate at which originally undecided voters are making up their minds (subtract the sum of both candidates’ support from 100 in order to get the portion that remains undecided). It is also easy to see that as more people are deciding, the two-party balance tips toward the Democrats. Since July 1, 33 percent of initially undecided voters chose Romney while 37 percent chose the president.

These decisions seem largely to have been motivated by party identification. Even though undecided voters tend to be weaker partisans than those who make up their minds very early, party is still a potent force for them. Sixty-three percent of initially undecided Democrats broke for Obama, and 67 percent of initially undecided Republicans ended up with Romney. More than half (55 percent) of independents, who make up nearly a third of the original set of unsure voters, picked the president — and his share of their vote is increasing as the campaign wears on, with 62 percent of independents choosing Obama over Romney since July 1st.

So far, this seems pretty straightforward: the share of undecided voters is going down as the election gets close, and in the last few weeks as these voters make up their minds, they have started to break slightly for Obama. But just to keep it interesting, at the same time that more people are finally making a decision, other people are moving away from their initial choice.

Between 3 and 4 percent of early deciders abandon their initial choice and have not made another when we re-interview them in 2012. That’s right: They have become undecided. This keeps the share of undecided voters relatively constant at any given point at approximately 6 percent; it’s just not the same 6 percent on any particular day. There’s movement into and out of being unsure (if this isn’t hard enough to follow, let me also point out that we re-interview people only once during the campaign so there may be even more volatility than we are tracking).

Voters who are undecided initially and those moving to uncertainty after expressing an initial preference look similar: They are less interested in politics than voters who have made up their minds; they know less about politics; they are more likely to be moderates or unaware of their political ideology; and they are less likely to have a party identification. They are not political junkies – for example, 40 percent of undecided voters correctly identify John Boehner as a member of the House of Representatives (out of five possible jobs he might hold) compared with 64 percent of voters who were never uncertain about whom they wanted to vote for.

But what about those political junkies who knew how they were voting when we asked them last December? How stable are their choices throughout an election year? Of early Obama voters, 96 percent have stayed with him throughout the 37 weeks of 2012. The same is true of Romney’s initial support; it’s incredibly steady at 94 percent. Slightly less than 2 percent of Obama’s initial supporters have switched over to support Romney (the other 2 percent have joined the ranks of the undecided); and nearly 3 percent of Romney voters have reciprocated and switched to Obama (with another 3 percent becoming unsure).

Interestingly, Romney is disproportionately losing women to Obama. Among those who are moving away from Romney and switching to Obama, 62 percent are women (47 percent of Romney’s initial voters were women). To make this clear, let’s say you are a woman who said you were going to vote for Romney when we asked you in December: You are twice as likely to change your mind and switch candidates (when we re-interview you in 2012) compared with women who initially chose Obama. Although to be fair, very few women are switching sides at all (4 percent leave Romney and 2 percent leave Obama).

And on an issue where the president’s position has changed, Obama has picked up 7 percent of Romney’s initial supporters who think same-sex marriage should be legal and 4 percent of those who are not sure about it, while Romney has nipped off 4 percent of Obama’s original set who think same-sex marriage should be illegal (and 1 percent of those who are unsure).

Obama picks up 10 percent of initial Romney supporters who thought the economy had gotten better over 2011, while Romney attracts 3 percent of initial Obama voters who thought the economy had gotten worse in 2011.

Perhaps most interesting are those voters who thought the economy had stayed the same throughout 2011: Obama pockets 4 percent of Romney’s voters who evaluate the economy this way, while Romney pilfers only 2 percent of Obama’s voters with this opinion.

A lot of stability and a bit of volatility — that is what presidential campaigns come down to. Before anyone sounds the alarm about the impressive levels of stability we see so far in 2012, it is worth noting that these levels are not unusual. In the 2008 C.C.A.P., over the same time period, 90 percent of Obama voters and 92 percent of McCain’s stuck to their initial choices. These choices are largely driven by party identification and the state of the nation’s economy — and 2012 isn’t any different from any other year in recent history in terms of stability and change.

Taken together, there is good news in these numbers for the president. He has the advantage among undecided voters who are making choices as Election Day draws near, and his initial supporters are quite loyal. Even among the small set of voters changing their minds, Obama is on equal footing with, if not slightly ahead of, Romney. Of course, there are six-and-a-half weeks and three presidential debates to go in the 2012 race. Maybe the last 40 or 50 days will be pivotal — but I’m not betting on it.

Lynn Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies at U.C.L.A. She is a co-author, with John Sides, of “The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election,” the author of “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns,” and co-principal investigator of the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project.

Most American voters have already decided whether they will pull the lever for Barack Obama or Mitt Romney in November. Their decisions were largely predictable even before Romney emerged as the Republican standard-bearer. But there are still a few people out there who are truly undecided — and if the race remains as close as it is now, their votes will be crucial to the outcome. Who are these people, and why do they seem to be having such a hard time making up their minds?

The one fact everyone seems to agree on is that there aren’t many of them. Using its latest polling data, The Wall Street Journal writes that “American voters are growing more polarized and locked in their views.” The Washington Post describes the election as “a settled issue for nearly nine in 10 voters.” The race is “tight and stable,” according to the Post’s Ezra Klein, who adds that “Romney and Obama are realistically fighting over three or four percent of the electorate.” And Paul Begala says “there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election” — 916,643 people in six swing states, to be much too precise.

Typical opinion surveys do not include nearly enough respondents to provide a statistically reliable portrait of this narrow undecided sliver of the electorate. However, the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project has been surveying 1,000 people each week since January, providing a much larger pool of respondents than any single survey can offer. By putting together the responses from 10 of these surveys conducted from May through July, we have assembled a mega-sample of 10,000 respondents interviewed after it became clear that Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee.

This mega-sample mirrors other recent polls in indicating a very close presidential race: among respondents who supported or leaned toward either major-party candidate, 51 percent chose Obama and 49 percent chose Romney. But crucially for our purposes, 592 of the 10,000 respondents (5 percent of the weighted sample) said they were not sure which presidential candidate they would vote for, then declined to express even a tentative leaning toward Obama or Romney in response to a follow-up question. These people seem to be truly undecided — and there are enough of them to provide an unusually detailed and reliable picture of undecided voters in the country as a whole.

These 592 undecided voters differ from those who have made up their minds (or are at least leaning one way or the other) in some unsurprising ways. For example, they are rather less knowledgeable about politics, and much more likely to say they follow news and public affairs “only now and then” or “hardly at all.” (Almost 40 percent are unsure which party currently has more members in the House of Representatives, and another 20 percent wrongly answered that it was the Democrats.) They are also considerably less likely to identify themselves as Republican or Democratic partisans, and less likely to call themselves liberals or conservatives (69 percent say they are moderates or not sure).

These differences may seem to confirm the common stereotype of undecided voters as “a group of people that have virtually no partisan or ideological attachments, pay very little attention to politics, and often create the crazy swings we see in the horse race polls,” as Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard put it recently. But that stereotype turns out to be quite wrong in some important ways.

For example, despite the marked overrepresentation of independents among undecided voters, most undecided voters are not independents. The accompanying figure shows the distribution of party identification among our 592 undecided voters, as recorded in a C.C.A.P. baseline survey conducted with the same people in late 2011. Only three in ten were “pure” independents (those who denied leaning toward either party), while another 7 percent said they were not sure about their party identification. Four in ten were Democratic identifiers or leaners, while the remaining 23 percent were Republican identifiers or leaners.

Larry M. Bartels

The fact that more than half of the voters who are currently undecided began the campaign season thinking of themselves as Democrats or Republicans naturally raises the question of why they have — at least so far — resisted supporting their party’s candidate.

Among Democrats, the most notable differences between the decided and the undecided are in their views about the president. For example, while 79 percent of decided and “leaning” Democrats approve of Obama’s job performance and 65 percent say they like him a lot, the corresponding percentages among undecided Democrats are only 17 percent and 8 percent.

Undecided Democrats’ dissatisfaction with Obama does not seem to be focused on any one issue. While 52 percent say they disapprove of his overall performance, the disapproval rates for specific questions about how he has dealt with the budget deficit, the economy, immigration, gay rights, health care, Social Security, Medicare, taxes and abortion all range from 61 percent to 51 percent.

Nor are their personal reservations about Obama focused on any one trait. The proportions who said they would “definitely not” describe him as “effective,” “inspiring,” “honest,” “strong,” “sincere,” or “patriotic” were each around 20 percent. Oddly, a larger fraction of undecided Democrats (30 percent) say they would definitely not describe Obama as “experienced,” despite the fact that he has already spent more than three years in the White House.

While undecided Democrats are clearly less than enthusiastic about Obama, there are indications that he could make some headway among them over the course of the next three months, especially if the economy shows some belated signs of further improvement. Only 18 percent of undecided Democrats strongly disapprove of the president’s performance; most say they “somewhat disapprove” (35 percent) or that they are not sure (30 percent). Presumably the third group, and perhaps the second as well, could be won over. Similarly, while only 3 percent of undecided Democrats currently say the national economy is getting better, 60 percent say it is “about the same” or that they are “not sure.”

If most undecided Democrats are taking a “wait and see” attitude toward the economy between now and Election Day, they seem relatively unlikely to be won over by Romney in the meantime. Three-fifths have an unfavorable opinion of the challenger, with only one-fifth still unsure about him.

If undecided Democrats are focused on Obama and the economy, undecided Republicans seem to have already made up their minds on those scores. Seven in ten disapprove of the president’s performance (45 percent strongly); only one-tenth say the economy is getting better, and even fewer say the country is “generally headed in the right direction.” Clearly, these are people who should be inclined to support the challenger. However, 35 percent say they “dislike” Romney personally, and remarkably — remember, these are Republicans — only 1 percent say they “like him a lot.” Moreover, 64 percent think Romney “says what he thinks people want to hear,” while only 8 percent think he “says what he believes.” (The corresponding percentages among other Republicans are 45 percent and 39 percent.)

Much of this personal antipathy seems to have emerged over the course of the primary season. In the baseline survey in late 2011, only 18 percent of these same now-undecided Republicans said they disliked Romney, while 9 percent said they liked him a lot. Some of this antipathy may stem from the fact that undecided Republicans are also distinctly more moderate than those who have made up their minds. Only 45 percent call themselves “conservative” or “very conservative,” while a similar number call themselves moderate or liberal. (The corresponding percentages among other Republicans are 73 percent and 23 percent.)

Undecided Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say they favor gay marriage (40 percent), twice as likely to express positive or neutral attitudes toward African-Americans (31 percent), and only half as likely to deny the existence of global warming (23 percent). Only 42 percent favor repealing Obamacare (compared with 78 percent of other Republicans). These are the sorts of Republicans most likely to have been alienated by Romney’s dogged appeals to “the base” during the Republican primaries. Whether he can moderate his image enough to win them back without exacerbating the common complaint that he “says what he thinks people want to hear” remains to be seen.

Obviously, it is impossible to tell from our snapshot of the current views of these undecided voters where they will end up — with Obama, with Romney, or at home. Nevertheless, our portrait of who they are and what they are thinking at this point in the campaign may shed some light on the candidates’ prospects in November. In particular, the fact that four of every ten currently undecided voters said before the campaign began that they identified with (or leaned toward) the Democratic Party probably bodes well for the president’s chances. A Democratic skew also appears in undecided voters’ reports of how they voted in 2008 (43 percent for Obama to 33 percent for McCain, with only 23 percent saying they didn’t vote) and even in 2010 (23 percent for Democratic House candidates, 17 percent for Republicans). If they break similarly in 2012 — a big if — the result may be to swing a seemingly “tight and stable” race narrowly in favor of the incumbent.

Larry M. Bartels is a professor of public policy and social science at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.” Lynn Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies at UCLA, the author of “The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns,” and co-principal investigator of the 2012 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.